Operation Echelon: Will Obama resurrect Clinton's spy program?

For example, when Clinton appeared on ABC's Nightline in 2006, on which he was interviewed by newsman Terry Moran, he took the opportunity to question President Bush's counterterrorism tactics. When Moran asked Clinton questions regarding what the media called domestic spying by the National Security Agency, Mr. Clinton said that President Bush may have broken the law when he authorized the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance on US-based terrorists.

Asked if he thought Bush had gone too far by circumventing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap terrorists, Clinton told ABC's Nightline audience, "As a legal proposition, I don't know."

He claimed it would have been better if his successor had followed established legal guidelines and that "it seems to me that unless there's a reason not to, we ought to use that surveillance court."

Then without batting an eye, Clinton told viewers yet another whopper and was given yet another pass by the media. He said that when he was president, he always tried to work within the constraints of the law.

In other words, he lied.

In arguably the most secretive and far reaching electronic surveillance program ever created, the Clinton Administration and the National Security Agency employed a global spy system, code named Echelon, which monitored just about every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world.

The Echelon system was fairly simple in design: position intercept stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic, and then process this information through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA, including advanced voice recognition and optical character recognition programs. The system would look for code words or phrases (known as the Echelon Dictionary) that would prompt the computers to flag the message for recording and transcribing for future analysis.

 

Intelligence analysts at each of the respective listening stations maintained separate keyword lists for them to analyze any conversation or document flagged by the system, which is then forwarded to the respective intelligence agency headquarters that requested the intercept.

But apart from directing their ears towards terrorists and rogue states, Echelon was also used for purposes well outside its original mission. This regular domestic surveillance targeted American civilians, according to intelligence expert Patrick Poole.
 

 

For example, if I'm discussing terrorism with a colleague, the words "terrorist," "explosives," "weapons," "training," would all be flagged for further surveillance.

The program was controlled by the NSA and operated in cooperation with the Government Communications Headquarters of England, the Communications Security Establishment of Canada, the Australian Defense Security Directorate, and the General Communications Security Bureau of New Zealand. These organizations were bound together under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms and text remain under wraps even today, according to Poole, an adjunct professor at Bannockburn College in Franklin, Tennessee.

In a May 27,1999 story in the New York Times, Americans first heard about Echelon. Two congressmen, Republicans Bob Barr and Porter Goss, who later served as Director of Central Intelligence, demanded information on the program. But, Democrats defended Clinton's spying on Americans as a "necessary evil." Barr and Porter's demand for information on Echelon died when President George W. Bush replaced Clinton in the White House.